I thought I knew everything about heartbreak.

I’d been through a million breakups and breakdowns. Heartbreak is something else entirely.

Heartbreak is a fucking expensive therapy bill.

I had to leave the first therapist I had after the breakup. She just kept telling me how great it is that I have this ‘ability’ to feel so deeply. That my depth was a gift the right person would receive with open arms.

Whole package, wrong address and all that.

But it didn’t feel like a gift. And I felt anything but whole.

I’d been through enough to think I understood pain. But nothing prepared me for this particular violence.

Heartbreak is a sickness. Soul-destroying in a way I still don’t have the language for.

I have to say the quiet part out loud.

There were moments I would’ve given up anything to make it stop. Yes, anything. Anyone. Even myself.

In the depths of my despair, I had to remember the world was going to the dogs in far more consequential ways than my love life. People survive far worse every day. My gratitude journal was working overtime.

What a privilege it is to have your heart broken and this be the only reason you cannot get out of bed today.

It dawned on me recently that my last breakup was the first time I had ever experienced real heartbreak. I’d had breakups before. I knew the ache of missing someone. I knew grief, disappointment, endings. I thought heartbreak was just a dramatic word for those things.

It isn’t.

They are both versions of the same thing, but there is a difference between a breakup and heartbreak.

Heartbreak is a full psychological and physical event. It drives you to madness. And if it doesn’t, then I’m not entirely sure you’re doing it right. And I’m not just talking about my recurring breakdown in the aisles of Waitrose or screaming in the middle of the road while my friend stood a few feet away cheering on encouragingly, “That’s it, girl! More! Let it out!”

What I’m describing is so much more insidious than outward displays of pain, depression or anger. More than calling him when you know you shouldn’t or doing all the things you know will make it worse.

People will feed you logic. You will repeat this logic to yourself. But there is no logic. Just ache and loss of self.

And that’s where the real insanity lies. Not in loving too much or wanting too much. But in the speed at which you’ll abandon yourself for something that isn’t meant for you. Just to dull the pain. Just a little bit. Just for a while.

At times I was unrecognisable.

Even my most painful breakups have always been: They’re gone but I’m still me. I like me. And we will both move on. And it might sting. But I’ll still be me. Just with a little more fire and new clothes.

A bad breakup was missing that person and coming to terms with letting that person go. Feeling a twinge of pain when something reminded me of them or my heart sinking at the thought of them moving on with someone else. That part is all the same. I knew I’d feel all of those things. Heartbreak was all of that magnified beyond reason. But there was another part that I had never anticipated.

The breakup is losing them. Heartbreak is losing the version of yourself that only existed beside them. Because I wasn’t still me anymore. And I wasn’t going to be me again.

Not that me.

There was a version of me that only existed with that person. And I had to brutally murder her.

She was clean. Not perfect. Just uncontaminated by all the disappointment that came before and untouched by all the ache that came after. The version of me that was grown and sure and certain. I’ve never been so certain in my life. She felt soft and kind and believed in the future as if it had already happened. I knew her. I liked her. I thought I would always be her.

That version of me was reserved only for my life with him. And I casually annihilated her on a random Thursday in May.

I didn’t realise how attached to that version of me I was. That was the real attachment wound that was ripped open. The wound I kept digging my fingers back into and clawing at in my sleep, leaving it bloody and infected.

The most frightening part was not losing him. It was meeting a stranger in the mirror. I discovered that grief was not for him alone, but for the self I became with him.

It felt like losing a parent. I felt like a child wrapping my arms and legs around a corpse, being pried away finger by finger, screaming for home. But now there was no home.

If I’m honest, the heartbreak didn’t begin when we ended. It first hit me while I was still in the relationship. That’s why I left. One weekend, it hit me all at once and I was bedridden for days. And I knew I couldn’t stay. So I fled. As soon as I felt this sudden ache that ripped me open, I called us off without a plan. But I didn’t anticipate that by ending my relationship I was also severing the tie to that version of myself.

In the past, I had always begun that transition while still inside the relationship. I would quietly step out of one version of myself and prepare to become another. I imagined her and her new life before I even left.

This time, I didn’t.

My logic was saying “he’s not your person. He’s not going to fix it,” and I knew it. But the feeling of missing a person who both is and isn’t me was so foreign I couldn’t even recognise who I was missing. All I knew was that it had something to do with him. So he was the thing I kept reaching for because it felt the closest. I couldn’t sit with the discomfort of being so unfamiliar to myself.

I thought I knew exactly who I was. But now I had no fucking clue. The girl before felt gentle. Easy to love. But now I felt none of those things. What was left afterwards felt like every part of me that had only ever learned how to survive.

So I started a war with myself, fighting every version of me except the one I couldn’t be anymore.

It brings new meaning to self-loathing.

The part I’m afraid to admit is that for a long time, I was scared to step into a new version of myself because I couldn’t lose her. Even when I thought I’d closed the door, I left the window open. I left the house but I left the lights on and the doors unlocked in case someone came home.

But it was never my home in the first place. And I was never waiting for him.

I used to think my problem was that I felt too much. It wasn’t. My problem was where I directed that depth, and how quickly I abandoned myself in the process.

Feeling deeply was never the flaw.

Feeling things deeply doesn’t make you crazy.

For a while, I thought speaking about the pain was the same thing as healing it. Narrating heartbreak and healing heartbreak are not the same task. One performs clarity. The other requires it. I thought if I could understand it more and explain it beautifully enough, I could outrun it. But being articulate about a wound is not the same as tending to one.

Heartbreak doesn’t always create the wound. Sometimes it simply finds one already there.

I kept thinking peace would arrive through one final conversation, one final answer, one final moment of understanding. It didn’t. It arrived when I stopped asking someone else to hand me what I could give myself. Getting over it had nothing to do with missing that person less. It had everything to do with trusting myself more.

Some losses arrive to return us to ourselves. You can deeply love someone who is not your home. And just because something breaks you open doesn’t mean it was meant for you.

Most of all, I learned to allow myself grace. Because, in all honesty and contradictions, heartbreak did send me a little mad.

I mourned the person I was because she felt softer, kinder, easier to love.
But the bitter woman, the angry woman, the mad woman, the artist. She was always mine too. I was softer in safety, harsher in pain, and still myself in both states.

Healing was not becoming one untainted version of myself. It was learning I am all of them.

That is the whole package.

And the right address? My house, baby.

See you next time in the confessional.

Blithe x

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